Ghostly Entanglements and Ruptures: Textual-Material-Animal Encounters with Charlotte’s Web

Abstract

This analysis considers how education positioned at the intersections of literature and nature can help expose and confront the violence of animal agriculture. To do so, it extends from field research in London, Canada, with children who discursively and materially engaged with the story Charlotte’s Web through guided walks in an altered landscape. Once farmland and now a rapidly declining forest behind their school, this sociohistorical space is home to lingering remnants of an animal agricultural past that evoke the pastoral imagery of the novel. In combination with a place-based lens that recognizes settler-colonial agrarian legacies, the animals and interspecies relations of Charlotte’s Web offer an invitation into seeing and empathizing with farmed animals, both past and present. This analysis traces theoretical and pedagogical pathways that challenge embedded anthropocentrism and promote diverse subjective engagements with the multispecies world. Together, Indigenous ways of knowing, relational ontologies, and Derrida’s notion of hauntology can help illuminate an ethically and environmentally engaged literacy education within the Anthropocene.

This article explores how education deliberately situated at the intersections of literature and nature can begin to expose and confront the historical and enduring violence of colonialism and animal agriculture. Emerging from a larger international study by the Common Worlds Research Collective devoted to climate pedagogies, this project aimed to engage children imaginatively, materially, and ethically with the story of Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White.¹ Guided by the broader theme of witnessing the ruins of progress, this research was animated by the goal of attuning educators and children to the transformative influences and consequences of land development for human and nonhuman lives.²

The research was conducted in a rapidly developing suburban area in London, Ontario, Canada (population 422,000). The land was the traditional territory of different Indigenous nations, including the Anishinabek, Lūnaapéewak, Haudenosaunee, and especially the Attawandaron. Settler-colonial arrivals then turned the land into farms. Although the specific reasons and details are unclear, after many decades, these agricultural spaces ceased to be used for farming and became filled with trees and bush. As the city’s population grew and its infrastructure expanded, the land was again remade and repurposed into a suburban enclave. In 2016 a Catholic primary school was built and within it an early childhood education center, the primary site of this research.

Not all of the area’s land was transformed, and in 2017, when this research began, an emerging suburban neighborhood, construction sites, and wooded terrain were all present simultaneously. In this geographic and sociohistorical context, we (both researchers and educators) engaged the children in walks through the altered landscape, culminating with intentional wanderings through the vanishing forest that remained. We attuned ourselves to the forces of change and their effects/affects—both direct and indirect—on the surrounding ecology, placing particular emphasis on the besieged nonhuman animals struggling to survive the anthropogenic damage inflicted on their habitat.

Crucially, we would regularly encounter the ghostly remnants of an animal farm. The structures signifying animal containment, most notably the ever-protruding coils of rusted barbed wire, remain literally embedded in this land. These sticky remnants prompt uneasy feelings and questions about the confined lives of those farmed animals. Indeed, these are questions that are often neglected across contexts, including the scholarly and educational. As Kathryn Gillespie argues, animal agriculture is underexamined in scholarship devoted to animal precarity in the context of the Anthropocene. She observes that the lack of critical engagement with the ethical contradictions of animal agriculture remains a conspicuous omission as it is the “one institution that highlights the ongoing violence of colonial-capitalism on vulnerable life, on social relations and lifeways, and on the landscape[s].”³ She argues that lamenting the precariousness inflicted on wild animals while ignoring the monstrosity of animal agriculture tells only part of the story.

Thoughtful educational engagement with the novel Charlotte’s Web can help illuminate the experiences of animals forced to live, and ultimately die, in agricultural contexts, past and present. This classic and widely read children’s novel written by E. B. White in 1952 revolves around the travails of a pig protagonist named Wilbur and his desperate yearning to escape the farmer’s blade. The book begins with a little girl’s heroic intervention at the sight of an unfolding primal scene where her father is about to slaughter a runt juvenile pig. When her father offers an instrumental rationalization for the unsettling act—that the pig is too small to offer value—Fern objects passionately: “This is the most terrible case of injustice I have ever heard.”⁴ While Fern succeeds in saving the pig she names Wilbur from certain slaughter, he remains precariously linked to the meat economy until a dying spider named Charlotte spins a literal web campaign that succeeds in rebranding Wilbur as a special pig of intrinsic value, finally freeing him from the “carnistic” loop.⁵Charlotte’s Web thus invites awareness of the immiseration inflicted on farmed animals for human purposes and encourages reflection on the fundamental ethical question of what we owe to animals. In the landscapes of this research, it also offered the children a powerful symbolic analog to illuminate their journey through a forest haunted by the scattered remains of the land’s agrarian past.

This analysis examines the pedagogical potential for confronting the anthropocentric violence inflicted on wild and farmed animals alike through a commitment to literary and place-based education that engages Charlotte’s Web diffractively and experientially through hauntological and relational lenses. After outlining the methodologies and theoretical frameworks used, I delve into the textual, material encounters from my field research. In particular, I emphasize the significance of boundary transversals and crossings of both literal and figurative varieties. Finally, I offer a critically engaged and historically robust material, interspecies, and pedagogical analysis that looks beyond the culturally inscribed temporal and species divides to imagine new possibilities for literacy and literary education.

Common Worlds Methodology

This research was undertaken as part of the Common Worlds Research Collective and is guided by Anna Tsing’s theorization of the “arts of inclusion” and “arts of noticing.”⁶ This commitment involves attuning ourselves to the sights and sounds of the multifarious, multispecies worlds around us, including the signs of escalating human encroachment into these animal spaces. The Common Worlds’ relational and land-based approach to education challenges masculinist and anthropocentric ideologies embedded in unexamined positivist pedagogies.⁷ We contextualize animal concerns within a broader, intersectional research approach that aligns climate, decolonizing, and anti-oppressive pedagogies to disrupt the hegemony of human exceptionalism embedded in educational curriculum and practice.⁸

The data generated from our encounters with text, animals, and nature were recorded through photography, video, field notes, pedagogical documentation, and children’s drawings made in the classroom and forest.⁹ These methods were employed with the goal of activating and attuning senses, perspectives, and imaginations to the “polyphonic assemblages” of the more-than-human world surrounding us.¹⁰ To this end, the project engages with Donna Haraway’s notions of “worldings” or the co-construction of worlds to combine observation with imaginative engagement in a way that allows the children to materialize and perform the text.¹¹

Many Indigenous nations, including the Haudenosaunee, have always emphasized a multispecies ethic based on relations of “mutual reciprocity,” long before the recent Western animal and more-than-human philosophical turns.¹² We engaged in a methodology of walking as a means of learning with (that is to say, relationally and reciprocally) as opposed to learning about (i.e., through positivist, settler-colonial assimilation) the flora and fauna behind the school while also attuning ourselves to the sedimented vestiges of the past. This combination of walking and active reflection offered decolonizing pedagogical potential.¹³ This orientation also aligns with Jacques Derrida’s theorization that justice requires attention to the past and future, a temporality that resonates deeply with Indigenous ethico-ontologies.¹⁴

The Anishinabek scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has argued that settler colonialism, in concert with capitalism, is inherently extractionist, converting what it extracts into assimilable resources while erasing Indigenous histories and relations.¹⁵ Educators must always be cognizant of these extractive practices and how settler-colonial education was weaponized through the century-long residential school project in countries like Canada and the United States to eviscerate, assimilate, and erase Indigenous communities, families, and cultures. At the same time, educators must be aware of what Alexis Shotwell calls “epistemic extractivism,” whereby settler activists appropriate and even perform Indigenous ways of knowing and being as a means of addressing traumas inflicted on land, people, and animals by a settler-colonial capitalism.¹⁶

Indeed, it is important for settler education to promote decolonization through deeper awareness of Indigenous ways of knowing without engaging in such performative “moves to innocence” modeled on normative and often decontextualized settler notions of Indigeneity.¹⁷ Settler-colonial capitalism (to which education has largely been a dutiful servant) eradicates the past while destabilizing possibilities for sustainable futures. It also instrumentalizes and commodifies animals and nature. Education, including literary education, is invested in maintaining a “compulsory humanity” at odds with Indigenous ways of knowing and being.¹⁸ Therefore interventions that critique and disrupt settler-colonial capitalist values in ways that genuinely respect and amplify varied Indigenous worldviews present a crucial step toward decolonization. By engaging with a settler-colonial text (Charlotte’s Web) but reading and teaching it through disruptive Western theoretical frames, educators can challenge hegemonic colonialist orthodoxies in ways that align with many complementary Indigenous value systems. While Indigenous-led and written works and initiatives are the most significant and central avenues through which to pursue decolonized pedagogies, certain white, Western texts that remain part of classroom curriculum can be reimagined in ways that align with a decolonizing commitment and ethic that challenge the human exceptionalism embedded in the Western/settler-colonial curriculum.¹⁹

Diffractive Reimaginings

Guided by these imperatives, I interconnected our literary and material encounters and framed them as a participatory common practice.²⁰ I drew on Karen Barad’s notion of diffractive analysis, “a methodological practice of reading insights through one another.”²¹ In this way, I encouraged the children and educators to read the book through their animal-material encounters and likewise to read those very same animal-material “intra-actions” through Charlotte’s Web.²² Furthermore, I sought to invigorate the preschool classroom experience by immersing ourselves in the forest. This allowed us to connect the literary representations we were reading and reimagining to the material agrarian remnants scattered throughout the surrounding forest as they cast a haunting resonance with the pastoral farm space depicted in Charlotte’s Web. Our shared awareness of the story invests these surroundings with a sense of its former life, and indeed, human and animal lives, that would otherwise be diminished. I hoped to engage the children as active, imaginative participants by encouraging them to co-construct the story through the spatial, material, and kinesthetic entanglements inspired and observed over the course of this textual-material-multispecies journey.

To help analytically conceptualize these processes, I enlist Derrida’s notion of “hauntology.” He reminds us that acknowledging the antecedents to our present moment is the first ethical step in disrupting anthropocentric, neoliberal, and colonial narratives. When we neglect the antecedent of the current event then we are forever adrift in a perpetual present, alienated from the past and unable to construct a viable and ethical vision of the future.²³ In that spirit, we attune ourselves to the worlds that are at once vanquished, existing, and emerging around us in order to disrupt the Western, settler-colonial, anthropocentric, and neoliberal ontological consensus that privileges the present without consideration for the past and holds only an instrumental, short-term, and equally anthropocentric regard for the future. Multitemporal vision is necessary for confronting the climate emergency and its multispecies effects; it is to this end that Derrida’s notion of hauntology offers a valuable theoretical intervention that further complexifies ontology and its conceptual foundation of being and becoming.

For Derrida, ontology privileges the present while erasing the memories that inform our current state of being.²⁴ What of the legacies of prior events and happenings, and the traces of those legacies, that permeate our perpetual but ever evaporating present? To address this question, Derrida argues that “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism.”²⁵ In other words, ontology addresses what is, while hauntology addresses what was and how the traces of what was influence what is and what will be. Again, it must be acknowledged that Derrida’s challenge to Western linear temporality follows the ontological commitment to “temporal heterogeneity and temporal multiplicity” that characterizes many Indigenous cultures.²⁶

To this point, Simpson has long argued that a land-based, Indigenous onto-ethico-epistemological reorientation is required in an environmental education grounded in an intergenerational commitment to past, present, and future generations: as she frames it, “looking to the ancestors to prepare for the future.”²⁷ Similarly, the Mi’Kmaq scholar Margaret Robinson points to oral traditions wherein “animals are portrayed as our siblings,” positioning “humanity and animal life as being on a continuum, spiritually and physically.”²⁸ These Original peoples’ perspectives on human-animal relations, grounded in an ethic of “mutual reciprocity,” have influenced this research project. I wish to acknowledge the Indigenous onto-epistemologies that precede relational and hauntological interventions and to enlist a diffractive method to read these frames through each other as a means from “which new concepts or traditions, new philosophies can be engendered” that support decolonizing principles and pedagogies.²⁹

Ghostly Intrusions Informing the Present

Western educational practices, much like economic enterprise, are ontologically oriented toward the future. Both are focused on development, productivity, and growth and have cultivated advanced quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure progress, evaluate potential, and prescribe strategies to enhance output.³⁰ This is not to say that the goals of formal educational systems and capitalist enterprise are seamlessly aligned but rather that their values and aims are convergently constituted by the ontic principles and doctrines of capitalism itself.³¹ Much of settler-colonial educational infrastructure and culture mirrors capitalism’s short-term futurist orientation, privileging the perpetual emphasis on the present moment (and its immediate consequences) rather than a long-term commitment to the world, and lives, to come.³² The last half century of neoliberalism has intensified these processes by further diminishing the temporal horizons of the past—as well as the future—to prioritize the immediacy of the forward moving present.

This ontological commitment to the present necessitates an ongoing erasure of the past. However, traces of what came before persist beyond erasure even if those traces are initially unintelligible within the temporal parochialism that pervades capitalist-neoliberal subjectivity. As Simpson argues, Western capitalist culture has often positioned itself in relation to matter, that which has long preceded us, as having value only insofar as it may be extractable and exploitable for immediate consumption.³³ The collective amalgamation of matter known as land becomes a commodity that humans can somehow possess without regard for the multispecies lives that exist within, on, and above it, while simultaneously erasing the histories of the Original peoples who inhabited the land.

Yet, despite the instrumentalist efforts of capitalist/neoliberal ideologies to disassociate the present from its antecedents, the legacies of the past, much like the repressed, return to haunt the weightless reverie of the now. The past impinges on the present in a ghostly fashion because the past no longer is, and yet its traces are all around us. This is an insight that Karen Barad refers to as the “metaphysics of the present” in her successive engagements with Derrida’s hauntology.³⁴ Through forest walks and readings, I sought to disrupt this pattern by “conjuring” the vanquished presences that preceded the ephemeral event of our own precarious moment.

Because human exceptionalism is so deeply embedded in educational onto-epistemologies, ecologically concerned educators should invest in methods that cultivate awareness of the diverse range of perspectives and agencies subordinated or erased by Cartesian positivism.³⁵ This means observing the surrounding precarity and considering how we are positioned in relation to it, while understanding that our very presence contributes to the precariousness of the manifold forms of life contained within it. In so doing, the vanity and greed that guide the conquest and conversion of nature and animals into manipulable matter become clear. The ruinous effects and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and expropriation that characterize Western capitalist cultures (and the destruction inflicted on nonhuman as well as human lives) are visible when we choose to notice.

Materializing and Animalizing Charlotte’s Web through Forest Encounters

I began reading Charlotte’s Web to the children in the classroom. After the young heroine’s intervention to save the runt pig she later names Wilbur, he is allowed to live and seems to pass the precarious threshold separating slaughter and companion animals. Yet, later in the book, Wilbur is returned to the agricultural economy, where he is again consigned to the status of slaughter-bound animal. He is kept in a barn from which he yearns to escape, and one day he discovers an opportunity to leave through a loose board in a wall. Wilbur is apprehensive at first, but he decides to cross the threshold and runs free through the field and trees.

The transversal of boundaries, borders, and binaries, notably the nature/culture, textual/material, past/present, and rational/imaginative divides, and the stories inspired by these crossings are particularly salient to this project. A primary motif in Charlotte’s Web is the crossing of various thresholds and confines. After reading the chapter depicting Wilbur’s escape from the barn, we decided to walk with the children through the forest to see what material and ghostly connections might resonate with Wilbur’s experience. During our many previous forest walks, we encountered rabbits, turkey vultures, and even deer. We reflected on the ways these animals regularly crossed boundaries between the shrinking forest and the rapidly encroaching human residential space and observed how they endured, though in ever-diminishing numbers. In our classroom readings of Charlotte’s Web, we discussed another boundary, the distinction between wild animals and domesticated animals like Wilbur. Consequently, many of the children began empathizing more with the experience of farmed animals, a connection further intensified by the growing awareness that the school’s wooded environs once contained many such animals. Specifically, when we entered the forest, the children were captivated by the barbed wire that eerily recasts the restrictive boundary of the past, one that contained animal bodies until their inevitable slaughter. Although the former fence was mostly collapsed, it retained the potential to ensnare the feet of a careless walker. For the most part, however, the wire was harmless. Yet the hold it retained over the children became deeply symbolic; it established a division between zones that the preschoolers seem inclined to respect. Their responses and interpretations inspired us to reread chapter 3 in the forest at the site of the remains of the barbed wire fence, illustrated in the following vignette:

Of all the remnants of the agricultural past scattered throughout the forest, nothing was more haunting than the barbed wire fencing protruding from the ground. This rusted and dilapidated metal enclosure, now entangled with the flora, suggests the existence of a once oppressively jagged but now vastly diminished barrier. We understood that what existed here has come to constitute a lost pastoral utopia to many, but to the entrapped animals, many of whom, like Wilbur, were designated as slaughter animals, the space would seem unmistakably dystopic. Such barbed wire fencing constituted “violent technologies of control” over the animals contained within while it enforced settler-colonial property claims over the land from Indigenous and non-land-owning people without.³⁶ Today we see wild rabbits and turkey vultures traverse these once-imposing former boundaries with ease. Wilbur gives voice to the farmed animals confined in this space all those years ago. I encouraged the children to engage empathetically with Wilbur and farm animals like him by posing the question:

This proved to be a powerful provocation for the children as our material and textual forest encounters soon spilled into the classroom. In an after-reading activity, the children were asked to sketch the scene. A few of the children began sketching lines. One of the sets of lines had discernable jagged edges of the barbed wire. The children confirmed that they were drawing the fence from the forest—it was this material threshold that they envisioned Wilbur transgressing. Some of the other children took notice and were energized by the artistic conjuring of the barbed wire fence line in the classroom space.

Later, we encouraged the children to kinesthetically enact Wilbur’s escape as we read the specific passages describing this event. The children designated lines on the floor that they would cross to emulate Wilbur’s escape but again reconceived as crossing a lined boundary rather than through a hole in the wall. The classroom space increasingly came to embody Haraway’s notion of the “natureculture,” not materially, as we refrained from taking souvenirs, but spectrally as the room was increasingly adorned with imagery inspired by the hidden layers revealed over the course of our forest walks, readings, and creative engagements. The classroom was arranged by the educators, coresearchers, and me to simulate the boundary/threshold so that the children could continue to explore the idea of passing from one domain to another. We then taped paper rolls down to the floor on opposite sides of the classroom. We engaged the children into the practice of print and design by bringing easels and paper into the learning space. We divided the class into two groups and guided the children to engage collaboratively in a common practice of letter printing and drawing (with graphite), inviting them to engage creatively with the paper rolled out onto the floor. As sources of inspiration, we projected images of our forest encounters (including images of the barbed wire fence and the rabbit droppings scattered throughout the forest) on the wall along with posters of printed text from Charlotte’s Web.

The children generated a diverse range of creative responses to these arrangements and represented these encounters in kinesthetic and performative expressions, such as by restaging Wilbur’s escape by jumping across our classroom boundary, as well as by etching and printing engagements on the paper and easels. Many of the children drawing collaboratively on the paper rolls were committed to sketching the barbed wire fence and other farm refuse (e.g., rusted buckets, shovels, etc.). Through their imaginative and interpretive telling, the children reconstructed their textual and material experiences into a participatory common practice that emphasized the relationality between text, animals, materiality, and our surrounding environment. At the same time, the children’s textual-material engagement with the barbed wire fence prompted them to consider how farmed animals, like Wilbur, feel when they are confined for human purposes.

Re-storying the Rational

After reading about Wilbur’s escape the children became captivated by the idea of crossings in the forest. Previously on the forest walks we would stop before we reached the barbed wire, both as a practical marker and for safety concerns. Soon this ominous remnant of an earlier time would come to occupy an increasingly mythic space in the children’s shared imaginary as they came to accept the prohibitive boundary it inscribed on the land. The children, in their way, came to see this lapsed barbed wire as a symbolic portal linking us to the embodied experiences of farmed animals like Wilbur. Recognizing this affinity, they gradually became inspired to cross this boundary, one they now regarded as restrictive (and indeed somewhat sinister) rather than protective. In this way, this former space of animal containment and slaughter haunted our textual-material intra-actions in the forest.

Along these dystopian lines, Ursula K. Le Guin has argued that Western positivism has “terrorized (us) . . . into being rational.”³⁹ She argues that the indicative mode is the voice of rationality and that it has dominated written discourse (particularly academic, professional, and policy modes of writing) since the Enlightenment, thereby framing and filtering our perceptions and interpretations of the world around us. To counter the viselike hold of the rational indicative mode, she argues for more engagement with the subjunctive narrative voice. The subjunctive voice rejects the prescribed rational boundaries that structure our reality and relationship to the world and engages with the edges of things that are otherwise invisible.

The openness, thoughtfulness, and carefulness of the subjunctive mode inform our observational and narrative engagements with the ruins of the forest and the legacies of containment shrouded within. This is not to suggest that there is no space for rationality and the indictive voice, but that if we wish to zoom out from that small snapshot to see beyond the human-centered event experienced in a continuous present, we must consider new ways of noticing as well as narrating. Seeing, interpreting, and writing exclusively in the same rational, indicative humanist mode predictably reproduces what Derrida calls a “neoliberal rhetoric . . . made up of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves and contemporary with themselves.”⁴⁰ If we as educators and researchers are to challenge the neoliberal rhetoric that is ever more pervasive in educational discourse and curriculum, we must examine the spectral staging of the event that informs the present but also the absence of the future or the present yet to come. In this way, the children’s engagement with literacy as a common, reconstructive practice allows them to subjunctively engage with the material and animal world(s) around them. The goal is to give space for a subjunctive disruption and reinterpretation of the human exceptionalist frames that have historically guided educational engagement with animals, and to generate the seeds for new possibilities. This is not to suggest that the pedagogical approaches documented in this study will, on their own, transform children’s consciousness, or that the children’s affective responses necessarily reflect enduring “empathetic engagement” with the textual and actual animals they encountered.⁴¹ Rather, it is to posit that educators attuned to animal and other more-than-human concerns may generate a curriculum that extends beyond embedded anthropocentrism, which could be deepened with cumulative pedagogies.

Conjuring Past Legacies to Confront the Silence of an Imagined Innocence

In Canada, the pernicious pedagogical legacy of the residential school system, a century-long educational project designed to eradicate the cultures and languages of Indigenous peoples through forced reeducation (a euphemism deployed to cover up systemic confinement; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; and murder) of children, has been increasingly brought to light.⁴² These widespread colonial educational atrocities were rendered culturally and historically absent, in Derridean terms, along with the genocidal legacy of the larger settler-colonial project, until the specters of these horrors were conjured again, summoned by the inexhaustible work and commitment of succeeding generations of Indigenous scholars and activists.⁴³ Accordingly, we must confront what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang call “moves to innocence” within education itself and acknowledge its capacity to be weaponized for oppressive and genocidal purposes.⁴⁴

Such “settler moves to innocence” characterize many of the spaces around our school. Notably, the rapidly built suburban housing developments were erected on the spectral remains of the land’s settler-agrarian past that followed the erasure of the Attawandaron peoples who previously thrived on the very same land. The ghostly farm remnants lingering throughout the space conjures a pastoral ideal in the cultural imaginary—not unlike the farm in Charlotte’s Web. Such idealized images of the agrarian past not only sanitize the farming practices of that time and present a conveniently sanitized, even ennobled, alibi for the industrial farming practices of the present, but they also erase the settler-colonial legacies of land expropriation that displaced and erased Indigenous presences.

On its surface, Charlotte’s Web would seem to embody the pastoral ideal of the settler-colonial farm, one E. B. White understood very well. In midlife he retreated from urban life to pursue life as a “gentleman farmer” only to become disillusioned with the internal contradictions of the farmer’s life, namely that the animal steward must also serve as animal slaughterer.⁴⁵

White’s “entangled empathy” with his animals inspired him first to reject the pastoral ideal of farming and then to write Charlotte’s Web.⁴⁶ The end result offers as powerful and pointed a critique of human exceptionalism as one may find in a children’s book. White subverts the image of pastoral purity by reimagining the idealized simulacrum of the settler-colonial farm from the perspective of Wilbur the pig and his desperate struggle to escape the blade; an unambiguously dystopian vision of farm life emerges from this subordinated, precarious perspective. This is an obscured, but nonetheless intended, frame through which Charlotte’s Web must be read, one that suggests rather unequivocally that human settlers preside tyrannically over their farmed animals while exercising an unremitting, and largely unreflective, dominion over the natural world.

Charlotte’s Web offers a vision of entwined animal worlds at the periphery of human experience. The domesticated animals have limited agency, and their existence is subject to the dictates or, in the case of the book’s human protagonist, Fern, the fickle whims of their human masters. Here it is important to note that the eponymous arachnid character in Charlotte’s Web is herself a wild and free animal who chooses to intervene on Wilbur’s behalf after the attention of his human benefactor, Fern, becomes invested elsewhere. Charlotte’s heroic intervention illustrates an animal-to-animal example of what Kendra Coulter calls “interspecies solidarity” and models an ethic of commitment and care for members of other species, one that we should all strive to emulate.⁴⁷ Such a commitment begins simply by noticing and, indeed, listening. In a key passage, Fern’s mother complains to the family doctor that Fern is talking to the animals and inquires whether he has heard an animal speak. The doctor’s response is instructive: “I never heard one say anything. . . . But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark. I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grownups. Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more.”⁴⁸ This gentle but pointed critique of humanity’s willful neglect of animals and the broader, more-than-human world speaks to the parochial limits of our anthropocentric values and of humanism more broadly.

White suggests that education is one means of averting destructive human tendencies toward nature and animals, as children are as yet uninitiated into full compliance with the tenets of human exceptionalism. This is not to suggest a return to the romantic associations of children with animals and nature—a gesture rooted in colonial paternalism that obfuscated the horrors of colonial oppression and expropriation by emphasizing a return to purity and innocence using Indigenous peoples of colonized lands as metaphors for an imagined human childhood.⁴⁹ It is rather to advance alternatives to the settler-colonial, neoliberal, indicative framing of the world, a world where adults no longer listen to animals, if they ever did.

Conclusion: The Ghostly Imprints of the Written Word

The confluence of temporal and material hauntings requires attention, acknowledgment, and appreciation to recognize the injustices of the past and to imagine “otherwise possibilities” for the future.⁵⁰ For Barad, there can be no looking forward without looking back. Similarly, Derrida argues that justice remains merely an abstraction until the entangled legacies, indeed the ghosts of the past as well as those of the future, are conjured and acknowledged. He argues, “No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations.”⁵¹ Later, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida would (like Barad) expand the victims of injustice to include animals, particularly those rendered for human consumption by the “animal industrial complex.”⁵² It is also important for education to expand its concerns beyond the anthropocentric species divide.

In addition to the spectral confluence of the temporal and the material are the representational phantasmagoric presences that emanated from our literary and textual encounters. The words written by E. B. White in 1952 emerged into our collective consciousness and inflected (indeed contaminated) our material and temporal encounters with the forest. Wilbur’s story resonates with the ghostly remnants of this agrarian past and serves to symbolically reanimate these ghostly (former) presences. Wilbur and the other farmed animals come to embody the animals that once lived and died here, and Wilbur speaks for the animals who could not communicate their will to live in the face of inevitable slaughter. He also speaks for the slaughter-bound animals currently alive and those yet to come. As the doctor informs Fern’s mother, the animals are speaking, but it is up to us to listen. Similarly, White’s words endure, but it is up to us to truly listen and understand his challenge to human exceptionalism, which seemed to confound mid-twentieth-century readers but has begun to resonate, many years after his death.

Attuning both analytical and educational approaches to listen and notice in such fashion helps facilitate the intertemporal and interspecies intersectionality required to meet Derrida’s standard of justice “beyond the living present,” toward standards of justice that are also accountable to the atrocities of the past, the suffering of the present, and the consequences for the future. This reorientation requires a commitment to reconciling the entangled colonial-imperial, capitalist, Eurocentric, human supremacist legacies of past and present in order to create more just, empathetic, and sustainable futures for children and all future beings yet to come. This requires a commitment to the lives of all animals, free and confined, with a pedagogy that emphasizes the injustice inflicted on them through human encroachment into natural habitats, as well as the continuous slaughter of farmed animals.

It is also important to reemphasize that intergenerational and interspecies commitments have long characterized Indigenous cosmologies and knowledges, predating the contributions of Derrida (and other Western scholars). But these knowledges are not mere relics of the past. After centuries of physical and cultural genocidal projects, Original peoples have endured while simultaneously providing leadership and insights for relational and sustainable stewardship; Eurocentric scholars, it seems, are now catching up. Regardless, the respectful collaboration of these two onto-epistemologies embodies Tsing’s notion that “contamination makes diversity.”⁵³ Similarly, Simpson writes, “If bell hooks or Franz Fanon speaks to my heart as an Nishnaabekwe, as both do, then Nishnaabeg intelligence compels me to learn, share and embody everything I can from every teacher that presents themselves to me. Nishnaabeg intelligence is diversity—Nishnaabeg intelligence as diversity.”⁵⁴ But this diversification, she argues, cannot thrive in an exclusively settler-colonial, academic, and educational terrain. Rather, it must be reimagined with a full commitment to the intelligence and values of Indigenous onto-epistemologies that illuminate pathways to reorient ourselves beyond the parochialism of the present and the violence of the anthropocentric. The theoretical interventions of Derrida, Barad, and Tsing complement the contributions of Indigenous ontologies and scholarship; when combined and diffracted through each other they allow us to see “multi-optically” and to appreciate the entangled legacies of colonial and “carnistic” violence.⁵⁵

Pedagogically, we worked to reorient the curriculum to foster a deeper awareness and appreciation of the thorny temporal and multispecies entanglements threading the present moment to its “staging” events from the past, much like the persistent barbed wire that still tangled and obstructed our movements in the present. Simultaneously, this process elucidated that we share an ecological commons with the animals around us where our mutual vulnerabilities and destinies may be entwined, albeit unequally so, a fact that conventional Western curricula obfuscate in favor of capitalist myths of human exceptionalism. Engaging with the essential, though often neglected, animal themes represented in Charlotte’s Web allowed us to involve the children in asking ethical questions about the subjugation and ultimate slaughter of animals. In doing so, the confluence of text and materiality generated unexpected provocations that encouraged the children to consider more-than-human beings as subjects and feeling beings with whom we coexist.

This project benefited from a rich and distinct situated space that linked the past, present, and future; but arguably, commitment to an intersectional, intertemporal, and multispecies orientation can be achieved in any space, symbolically and/or materially. By understanding earlier manifestations of species-based and colonial violence and the persistent presence of the past with attentiveness and care, we can strengthen our ability to respond to present and future iterations and, ideally, both imagine and cultivate very different futures.

Acknowledgments

This work was made possible thanks to research collaborations supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Common Worlds Research Collective.

Notes

References